GPS

Have you ever wondered why Uber can find you, but 911 can’t? Enter Advanced Mobile Location, or AML, a new caller location technique in case of an emergency. Apple began using this life-saving solution in the iOS 11.3 update.

It’s the little shortcuts Apple Watch can provide in life that make wearing the device oh so rewarding at times. The most prominent ones have certainly saturated Apple’s marketing and most corners of the internet by now, still many smaller tricks are hardly covered simply because they can be so darn hard to find.

The following one certainly falls into that category, as I had never heard or read about it before, and I frankly came across it by pure chance. If you have to hit the roads regularly and rely on Apple Maps and your watch to get to your destination, it’s a deft shortcut that makes sure you can keep your eyes on the road at all times – even if you need to make a phone call to the place you are currently headed!

Google recently introduced a location-sharing feature in the mobile Google Maps app that’s somewhat similar in functionality to Apple’s Find My Friends app. On your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Google Maps allows you to share your location with others for up to 72 hours, choose who can see where you are, hide other people’s locations from a map and more.

In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to share your real-time location on Google Maps with friends and family in case you’d like to let them know where you are and when you’ll get there.

To specify an exact location on a map, we have come to use addresses, landmarks or other easily identifiable spots as waypoints for our orientation. It’s common sense, right? Right. Except that the concept of reading a geographic map through a prism of man-made constructions is pretty flawed. This is especially true when you use various different services like Apple and Google Maps, who often yield inconsistent results for the same addresses, places and whatnot.

Enter latitude and longitude, the most reliable and unalienable GPS coordinates you can deploy to pinpoint a location. The best thing about them? Not only are they universally used and there’s unique codes for both your and your neighbour’s house, but they are also consistent no matter the mapping service you use.

In the spirit of that, the following piece will teach you how to show the GPS coordinates of any location on iPhone so that you can respond something like ’37.3305, -122.0296’ next time your friend asks for your whereabouts. And if you’re curious how to find that GPS location in Maps, we will demonstrate that too!